New York Times Book Review, February 1996
On Ted Hughes’s ‘Littleblood’
Ο littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains
Wounded by stars and leaking shadow
Eating the medical earth.
Ο littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
Ο littleblood, drumming in a cow’s skull
Dancing with a gnat’s feet
With an elephant’s nose with a crocodile’s tail.
Grown so wise grown so terrible
Sucking death’s mouldy tits.
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, Ο littleblood.
Littleblood. The name could belong to oral tradition, to fairy tale, to the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It could be a cognate of Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, an escapee from the conversation of Peter Quince or Robin Starveling. Like the names of Shakespeare’s fairies (and the fact that Littleblood eats ‘the medical earth’ confirms this impression) it could be the name of an ingredient in folk medicine, the requisite gout or smear from the cut neck of a bird or the pricked thumb of a spinster. It feels as if it might belong to a whole system of story or lore, and it would be easy enough to mistake the poem where it appears for one translated from some collection of material preserved more for its anthropological than its literary interest.
And of course the poem does belong in just such a collection. In the volume named for him, it is the last of the songs Crow sings, and the tenderest, and follows immediately upon the tundra-cheeps of ‘Two Eskimo Songs’. Reading it after the ‘Bessemer glare’ of all the other poems in Crow is like being exposed to some kind of healing ray. Like ‘eating the medical earth’ and finding in it at least a memory of its pre-atomic-age goodness. And this tenderness is probably why Ted always read it with particular delicacy and intensity, articulating the t of ‘eating’ and the d and hard c of ‘medical’ so finely and distinctly they were like the small twig-bones of a bird’s skeleton, a robin’s, say, since it was a robin’s breast I glimpsed – and the poem’s mention of a linnet has not dislodged the image – when my mind’s eye first blinked at the sight and sound of Littleblood, the name.
Littleblood, the name, only the name … To echo Edward Thomas is pertinent because this is to some extent a poem like ‘Adlestrop’, a poem where the lyric tremor of a proper name releases forces well below the surface. And there is another link between the two poets insofar as both are haunted by the shadow of the war in Flanders, and through that preoccupation with the British Expeditionary Force, they are shadowed too by earlier expeditions such as the one that culminated at Agincourt. In fact, Littleblood could just as well be found among the ‘dramatis personae’ of one of Shakespeare’s history plays, although he would probably fit in better with the pathetic flibbertigibbets of Falstaff’s ‘mortal men, mortal men’ in Henry IV, Part II than with the blooded soldiers of Henry V: he belongs more in the company of Mouldy and Shadow and Wart and Feeble and Bullcalf than of Gower and Fluellen and Macmorris.
But then, how can we be sure that Littleblood is a ‘he’? There is an element of androgyny about this ‘little boneless, little skinless’, something pre-pubertal and Ariel-like. Coming at the end of a book dedicated ‘In memory of Assia and Shura’, this wisp of a ghost dancer could easily be conflated with the shade of the girl-child who in the meantime has ‘Grown so wise grown so terrible/ Sucking death’s mouldy tits.’ Certainly the poem is set in the aftermath of traumatic, even cataclysmic events: the reapers of the whirlwind have prayed for the mountains to fall upon them, and now, ‘hiding from the mountains in the mountains’ something stirs in the eyehole of a cow’s skull, a kind of post-nuclear fledgeling, something as frail as the second coming of pity, that ‘naked, newborn babe/ Striding the blast’, an image which Ted reads (in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being) as proleptic of ‘a new kind of agonizing transformation’.
This transformation he characterizes as a shift in the plane of understanding from the tragic to the transcendental, and I have always tended to read ‘Littleblood’ as an instance of just that kind of transition. It is as if, at the last moment, grace has entered into the Crow-cursed universe and a voice that had hitherto been as obsessive and self-flagellating as the Ancient Mariner’s suddenly finds that it can pray. More than a quarter of a century before the publication of Birthday Letters, before the appearance of the poem ‘Freedom of Speech’ in which the shift to the transcendental has clearly occurred, Littleblood is granted this little moment of epiphany, sitting on the poet’s finger, singing in his ear, singing the song of both omen and amen.
The note of amen is proleptic: ‘Littleblood’ looks forward to ‘Freedom of Speech’ where Ted imagines a birthday party in eternity. The shade of Sylvia Plath is being fêted, Ariel perches on her knuckle and there is happy laughter in the land of the dead. ‘So be it’, the latter poem says, ‘let Ariel perch on a knuckle and let the stars not wound but “shake with laughter”.’ The note of omen, however, acknowledges that the understanding behind all future poems is going to be darkened, and what gives ‘Littleblood’ its mysterious, votive power is the coexistence of this tragic understanding with other, more transcendent desires and realizations.
The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes, ed. Nick Gamage (Faber, 1999)
Secular and Millennial Miłosz
Born in Lithuania in 1911, Czesław Miłosz is our secular poet not only because he is almost coeval with the saeculum itself, but because the term ‘the century’ keeps recurring all through his work. Decade by decade, the story of his life and the story of his times keep in step. In the twenties, he was a student in Vilnius and Paris. In the thirties, a member of the literary avant-garde in Poland. In the forties, involved with the Polish Resistance, a witness to the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi defeat of the Uprising, then attached to the Embassy of the People’s Republic in Washington. In the fifties, a defector from that regime, an intellectual in exile in France – his equivalent of forty days in the desert. In the sixties, a professor of Slavic languages at the University of California in Berkeley, in the full summer of his poetic powers, a Solomon among the flower-children. In the seventies, still in full creative spate, his status changing from émigré writer to world visionary. In the eighties, the Nobel prizewinner, a moral and political force in the Poland of Solidarity. In the nineties, a marvel of continuing imaginative vitality, a voice somewhere between the Orphic and the Tiresian.
Chronologically, therefore, Miłosz is nearly as old as the century, but culturally he spans the millennium which is now ending. Born a Catholic in the forest lands of Lithuania, he grew up in a culture that still remembered dark-age folk-beliefs and the shimmering systems of medieval scholasticism and Renaissance neo-Platonism. His experience of the ideological and military crises induced by Marxism and Fascism towards the middle of the century could stand for the mid-millennial crisis of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, just as his flight from ideological extremes into a more Voltairean cast of mind in the 1950s could represent the period of the Enlightenment. Romanticism followed, a total embrace of poetry and a trust in his ‘prophetic soul’, so that he has ended up on a hill above San Francisco Bay, a sage on the mountain, maintaining the gravity of being even as he inhales the increasingly weightless, late-capitalist, post-modern air of California.
But all this would not necessarily count for a lot had he not been granted what W. B. Yeats called the gift ‘to articulate sweet sounds together’. Miłasz’s poetry, even in translation, fulfils the ancient expectation that poetry will delight as well as instruct. It has a magnificent balance. The needle is constantly atremble between the reality principle and the pleasure principle: Prospero and Ariel keep adding their weight to either side of the argument. Miłosz dwells in the middle, at times tragically, at times deliciously, for he will renege neither on his glimpses
of heaven upon earth nor on his knowledge that the world is a vale of tears.
There is something Virgilian in this combination of tender-minded susceptibility and melancholy understanding. Indeed, there is something Virgilian about the curve of Miłosz’s whole destiny, both as man and as poet. Like the Latin poet, he is a child of the countryside, starting at eye level with the ripening grain and the grazing beasts and ending up at the twentieth-century equivalent of the emperor’s court. Both poets have left early work that is confidently lyrical and ‘gives glory for things just because they are’, but then in their maturity both proceeded to give plangent and abundant expression to their sense of ‘lacrimae rerum’, in longer and more elaborated works. In these, the subject was ‘arms and the man’, and the intonation of the poetry became increasingly grievous.
For example, a relatively early work by Miłosz, a sequence of lyrics written during the war and entitled ‘The World: A Naive Poem’, is a kind of twentieth-century equivalent of Virgil’s Eclogues. Virgil’s goat-herds play their reed pipes and take part in their song contests in a once-upon-a-time that is nevertheless haunted by contemporary reality. The evictions, the land-confiscations, the ravage of the wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar are the dark backing behind the mirror-glass of his pastorals. His famous ‘millennial’ Fourth Eclogue, which Christian apologists would later read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, was almost certainly a celebration of the Pact of Brundisium, concluded in 40 BC between Mark Antony and Octavian, and hence the vision it holds out of a return of the golden age is in fact a coded expression of hope for peace to come in the Roman world – although all that the future held in store for the moment was the Battle of Actium.
‘The World’, which is situated in a similar fashion between the idyllic and the political, was originally printed in clandestine conditions, on a hand-press in Warsaw. At a time when the Nazis were occupying the city and concentration camps were opening like hell-mouths all over Europe, Miłosz lifted his eyes to the pre-Copernican sunlight of his childhood home, a country where guardian angels hovered in the air and the security of the family house felt like a guarantee of harmony and benignity elsewhere and forever. The idiom of the poem is meant to echo the simplified, big-lettered writing in a child’s first primer, and the following section, entitled ‘The Porch’, is the third in a sequence of twenty:
The porch, its doorway facing westward,
With large windows, is warmed well by the sun.
From here, on all sides, you can look outward
Over woods, water, open fields and the lane.
But when the oaks have covered themselves in green
And the linden’s shadow covers half the flowerbed,
The world, far off, fades to a blue bark, half seen,
Carved by the leaves into dappled shade.
Here, at a little table, the sister and brother
Kneel drawing scenes of the chase, or of battle.
A pink tongue between lips helps along the careful
Great shapes of warships, one of which goes under.
(translation by Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky)
What the poet was conjuring was a vision of the land of Arcadia, in the full and ironical awareness that the only line of defence between it and the land of nightmare was the frontier of writing, the line that has to be held between the imagined and the endured. As in the case of Virgil, the felicity of the art was in itself a heartbreaking reminder of the desolation of the times.
There is no point in labouring this Virgilian parallel. At birth, each poet’s imagination was like an infant being rocked and cradled in a shield, and for each of them, experience of the shield-world gradually darkened their understanding and blocked out much of the light from the cradle-world – although that light did continue to emanate. Suffice it to say that the picture of Virgil enshrined in Hermann Broch’s great prose-poem about his death, the picture of a man hallucinating at the centre of the world of real-politik, a man in thrall to memory even as he was turned to for prophecy, a man at work in the mineshafts of language whom others regarded as a guide to the corridors of power, suffice it to say that this picture also fits the figure of the poet that Miłosz has created for our century.
One of the challenges which W. B. Yeats set for the artist privileged enough to ‘articulate sweet sounds together’ was to see to it ‘that civilization may not sink’, and to do ‘the spiritual intellect’s great work’. ‘Nor can there be work so great,’ Yeats declared in his poem ‘The Man and the Echo’, ‘As that which cleans man’s dirty slate.’ Miłosz did not shirk this work of invigilation and chastisement, and his prose writings on the moral and political dilemmas of the age are an indispensable back-up to his poetry and novels. In a book such as The Captive Mind, Miłosz rose to the historical occasion with a work which says j’accuse to members of his generation in Poland, his intellectual and artistic peers who because of either ideological ardour or exhaustion collapsed into the arms of Marxism. But what gives the book its edge over other cold war polemics is the fact that it is also saying, ‘There but for the grace of God – and my own solitude – go I.’ It has an Orwellian clarity and rigour about its ratiocinations, but behind the political and intellectual analyses one senses that the author is witnessing a much older drama, the struggle between God and Devil for the soul of Everyman.
To put it another way, Miłosz will be remembered as one who kept alive the idea of individual responsibility in an age of relativism. His poetry concedes the instability of the subject and constantly reveals human consciousness as a site of contending discourses, yet he will not allow these recognitions to negate the immemorial command to hold one’s own, spiritually and morally. That much, at any rate, he makes clear in a poem called ‘Ars Poetica?’, where the question mark in the title is no trivial gesture but a way of acknowledging a doubt about the worth of poetic vocation – a doubt as serious as any nineteenth-century Christian’s doubt about the literal truth of the Book of Genesis:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
Much is at stake from beginning to end in Miłosz’s poetry. After all, the tradition of Christian humanism – the tradition he was born into and that had such a formative effect upon his sensibility – was under assault from the moment he came to consciousness. His imagination is supplied and made ample by a fundamentally religious vision, the one based on the idea of Incarnation. What this entails is an assent to the stark, astonishing proposition that through the incarnation of the Son of God in the figure of Christ, the eternal has intersected with time, and through that intersection human beings, though creatures of time, have access to a reality out of time. This is the vision, after all, that gave us much that is glorious in western architecture and art – Chartres Cathedral and The Divine Comedy, The Book of Kells and Paradise Lost, Gregorian Chant and the Sistine Chapel – and it still inspires this poet to occasionally symphonic utterance.
‘Perhaps we forget too easily,’ Miłosz once said in an interview, ‘the centuries-old mutual hostility between reason, science and science-inspired philosophy on the one hand and poetry on the other.’ The figure of the poet as somebody on a secret errand, with ancient and vital truths in his keeping, appeals to him. Cultural memory, Miłasz’s work implies, is necessary for human dignity and survival. Many of the great set pieces in his poems are meant to be heard as variations upon ancient themes; they recognize the seeming frailty of the work done by artists and visionaries, yet they continue to oppose it to the work done by armies and other forms of overbearing force. The following lines – essentially a paean to poetic composition – constitute one such passage and form the opening movement of his sequence ‘From the Rising of the Sun’, written in Berkeley in the early 1970s:
Whatever I hold in my hand, a stylus, re
ed, quill or a ballpoint.
Wherever I may be, on the tiles of an atrium, in a cloister cell, in the hall before the portrait of a king,
I attend to matters I have been charged with in the provinces.
And I begin, though nobody can explain why and wherefore.
Just as I do now, under a dark-blue cloud with a glint of the red horse.
Retainers are busy, I know, in underground chambers,
Rustling rolls of parchment, preparing coloured ink and sealing wax …
*
Vast lands. Flickering of hazy trains.
Children walk by an open field, all is gray beyond an Estonian village.
Royza, captain of the cavalry. Mowczan. Angry gales.
Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,
So that what is stone in me could be dissolved,
So that nothing would remain but my tears, tears.
Everything that I admire and trust and turn to again and again in Miłosz is in these lines. Not only the deep images, but the deep knowledge. The here and everywhere, the now and always of the poetic moment. That which is existentially urgent and necessary, and yet pondered also, and caught up into the lucid order of poetry itself. Every association that the lines call up is a clarification of their unpuzzling mysteriousness. There is an inner inevitability, a sense that we are in the presence of a source of meaning.
‘What is poetry,’ Miłosz once asked himself, ‘which cannot save / Nations or people?’ The exorbitance of the question is natural in one who is a survivor from dark times, who was adjacent to the actualities of the Holocaust and many of whose contemporaries died in the face-to-face gun-battles of the Warsaw Uprising. But for all his self-accusation, Miłosz is a poet worthy of his century because he never did forget about the terrible reality of those happenings. At the end of a conference I attended in his honour in Los Angeles in 1998, he said, typically, that although many topics had been discussed, not enough attention had been paid to human suffering. Yet within this man who reminded us of suffering, who had seen tanks erase nations and peoples in Europe, and seen the body bags arrive daily from Vietnam at the height of the Haight Ashbury drug culture – within this man the boy who had made his First Communion in the age of innocence still survived; and in spite of the evidence of ‘human unsuccess’ which assailed the adult, the raptures and entrancements of that boy could never be denied.
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